It is often necessary for applications operating in a service oriented architecture (SOA) to exchange data that includes unstructured information (e.g., documents, files, etc.) and structured information (e.g., meta-data) that describes the unstructured information. For example, in a Product Lifecycle Management environment, there may be a need to exchange product overviews (i.e., structured data e.g., in an XML format) and associated design and development documents (i.e., unstructured data in computer aided design CAD files).
Current SOA software products are primarily suited to handle synchronous exchanges of structured data sets of limited size. Such approaches ensure a high Quality of Service. Unfortunately, there are situations in which the data to be transferred combines large volumes of both structured and unstructured data. In addition, it is not unusual for unstructured data to be distributed across a network, e.g., close to the users. Accordingly, there may be hundreds or thousands of nodes involved. Furthermore, current products are not suited to support the transformation of file formats or to provide restart capabilities on an exchange flow that has been partially processed.
Accordingly, a need exists for a solution that allows for the transfer of structured and unstructured data in a SOA infrastructure.